iPod + Wikipedia = A Real Hitchhiker's Guide

According to this Slashdot article: “Wikipedia Planning a DVD Version”, the entire contents of the English Wikipedia should fit onto two DVDs, or about 8 GB of data. That includes the many thousands of images included in most articles. Now, last I checked, the standard iPod had a capacity of 40GB.

There are a few existing programs written for the iPod that display text, such as iPod Notes which lets you keep text notes that you transfer from your PC and can read on the iPod. Going from there to a full eBook reader or HTML browser isn't difficult, the dual-ARM processor iPod has more than enough power to display rich text and images. (let alone the colour iPod Photo.)

Well, of course someone had this idea before me, but tried to implemented it using just the iPod notes feature and ran into the 1000 notes file limit.So far the easiest solution I can think of is to install Linux on your iPod, get a copy of Lynx and a static HTML tree of a Wikipedia dump and you're flying. No images, but the full text knowledge of over 500,000 articles, some even about things other than Science Fiction and Computers, is at your fingertips.

The nesxt problem would be searching. How do you get to the article you want? A category system like Open Directory might leave you about 7 jumps on average from the article you want to read. That's pretty good, and all but the most seasoned high-score initials enterers (ALX, baby!) would probably get the best performance that way. Especially since people seem to become true masters of spinning that click wheel exactly to where they want to be in their huge playlists.

The main controvertial aspect of Wikipedia is that anyone can edit it, and it isn't an authoritative source. On the other hand, like the Hitchhiker's Guide, 'where it's wrong, it's definitively wrong.'

(Now if only Apple would get over being made fun of on The Simpsons and release an updated, hard drive-based Newton, we'd have no problem..)Technorati Tags: Apple, iPod, Wikipedia